Cathedral Zone

My life has been filled with many contradictions, most of which have seemed intractable for the better part of my life. I was born in Krakow, the Polish capital of art and poetry, and so was privileged with a childhood steeped in beauty and creativity of immense refinement and depth. Here was light.
Having come of age under the Communist regime in Poland, I consider the renovation and renewal of these spaces a metaphor for my own journey from darkness to light.

“At a time when megachurches are filled to the rafters and cathedrals are almost empty, painter Joanna M. Wezyk goes to where the action isn’t—or at least, once was. In old churches Wezyk finds not the bustling brouhaha of the new evangelicals but the ghosts of bygone Christianity, and a potent spirituality in the process. Her paintings are often dark, brooding, haunting, and glowing. We see run-down houses of worship under construction, small cranes and hoes dotting the interiors. You can almost feel the coolness of the air and hear empty echoes. Somehow Wezyk peels back time, giving us a place of pictorial splendor, psychic revelation, and something like inner peace.” — Jerry Saltz

“Just the sorts of paintings we imagine Tim Burton would present to Helena Bonham Carter on some kind of momentous occasion — or, at the very least, to his interior decorator as inspiration — Joanna Wezyk’s dramatically lit renditions of abandoned Gothic cathedrals”.
Rachel Wolff, New York Magazine, January 2008